I've been reading the history of monopoly recently, here's some notes:
The book talks about Ralph Anspach, professor of economics at San Francisco state university...
"Pulling open his front door, Ralph called out a hello to his wife, Ruth, and his two sons—Mark, age twelve, and William, age seven. He was looking forward to eating a simple dinner with his family and perhaps playing a board game with them afterward."
"As smart and feisty as their parents, the boys were more politically aware than most children their age and were precocious Monopoly players. They loved everything about the game—its iconic Atlantic City properties, its tiny homes, its play money, its idiosyncratic tokens. The object of the game was to bankrupt all opponents and be the last person standing by acquiring real estate and charging rent. As players made their way around the board, they acquired or negotiated trades for properties. Then, they tried to get all of a like color grouping and build houses and hotels on their monopolies to jack up the rent, thus clearing out the coffers of their rivals."
"Getting warmed up, Ralph then railed against the economic culture that had fostered the current oil crisis—it was a far cry from the anti-monopoly climate that had existed in the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s, he said. Back then, “trust-busting,” or the breaking up of large monopolies and trusts, had been part of the national political discourse, and strong anti-monopoly laws had been put into effect. The laws had come in the wake of John D. Rockefeller’s and Andrew Carnegie’s strongholds on the oil and steel industries, respectively, which had raised prices sky-high and, critics said, destroyed many small businessmen and seriously undermined America’s standard of living."
"Suddenly, William interrupted his father. He had just won a game of Monopoly the night before, he reminded him. It had been a lot of fun. So how could monopolies be so bad? Had he done something wrong by winning the game?"
"Ralph’s punch line: Competitive capitalism is the best economic system in the world, but it is constantly being undermined by greedy monopolists. Since Adam Smith had also argued against monopolists, his theories couldn’t have been more relevant to what was happening in the 1970s, at least as far as Ralph was concerned."
"A better capitalist board game, Ralph said, would be one in which players competed against each other to produce better-quality, lower-priced goods while government regulated or abolished monopolies. In short, the game would teach the opposite of what the Parker Brothers game taught.
Then it hit him. He could create an anti-monopoly game of his own."
"When a player landed on a space on the Anti-Monopoly board, she or he could serve the monopoly with an indictment. The more indictments served, the more points earned. Players purchased indictment chips and brought cases against companies with spoofed corporate names: Egson Oil, Fort Auto, and Nazareth Steel. "
"Anti-Monopoly hit the market around the time that news about Watergate broke. In the ensuing weeks, details about the scandal, followed by denials from the Richard Nixon White House, unfolded day by day. Meanwhile, OPEC announced a plan to cut oil production by 25 percent. Ralph thought all the bad news boded well for sales of his antiestablishment pastime."
"A negative story about the game appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. “I can’t help thinking this game would be much improved if it didn’t constantly remind the player of its classic predecessor,” the Chronicle reporter wrote. “It’s a little like living in your first husband’s house with a second husband.”
"On his lawyer’s advice, Ralph wrote to game distributors to emphasize that Anti-Monopoly was produced by Anti-Monopoly Inc., which was not associated with Parker Brothers."
"Howes wrote on behalf of General Mills, the cereal king and Betty Crocker steward that had purchased Parker Brothers in 1968. Parker Brothers president Robert Barton, in consultation with his son, Randolph, had agreed to sell in order to diversify the family’s financial portfolio, and General Mills aspired to be a massive consumer conglomerate, part of an industry-wide trend toward mergers. "
